The publication of John Morrill’s new edition of The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell has been greeted with a remarkable unanimity of praise from the historical profession. Such consensus is itself a political fact. As the uploaded document insists, this edition “deserves to be examined not merely as an editorial achievement but in terms of its political and historiographical implications,” and the “universal acclaim from the historical profession should itself be interrogated.”¹ The task of Marxist historiography is not to echo academic fashion but to expose the class forces that shape it. Morrill’s edition is not a neutral scholarly improvement upon Thomas Carlyle’s 1845 text; it is an intervention in a decades‑long ideological struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution.
Carlyle’s Edition and the Revolutionary Tradition
Thomas Carlyle’s 1845 edition of Cromwell’s writings was a landmark in nineteenth‑century historiography. Despite his limitations—his “great man” theory and his later reactionary turn—Carlyle possessed the intellectual courage to recognise Cromwell as a revolutionary figure. Marx praised Carlyle for having “taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie at a time when its views, tastes and ideas held the whole of official English literature totally in thrall,” citing “his apology for Cromwell” as one of his most significant interventions.²
Carlyle understood, however imperfectly, that the English Civil War was not a constitutional misunderstanding but, in the words of the uploaded document, “a world-historical convulsion in which a class seized power through the execution of a king.”³ This insight—partial, distorted, but nonetheless real—explains why Marx and Engels valued Carlyle’s work. They recognised in the English Revolution the first great bourgeois revolution, the event that cleared the ground for capitalist development and inaugurated the modern epoch.
Carlyle’s edition was flawed, as the document acknowledges: “his transcriptions were not always reliable, his selection was idiosyncratic, his commentary was infused with his own increasingly authoritarian worldview.”⁴ But these were the flaws of a bourgeois radical struggling to articulate the class dynamics of a revolution whose full meaning only Marxism could later reveal.
The Rise of Revisionism and Morrill’s Role
John Morrill is not a neutral editor. He is a leading figure of the revisionist school that has dominated English Civil War historiography since the 1970s. This tendency—associated with Conrad Russell and others—denies that the 1640s constituted a bourgeois revolution. It rejects the notion of a rising bourgeoisie, dismisses the class character of the conflict, and reinterprets the revolution as a contingent political or religious crisis.
The revisionists insist that “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be found on either side of the struggle.”⁵ Even Cromwell, they argue, was not a revolutionary but “a representative of the declining gentry.”⁶
This is the intellectual framework within which Morrill has worked for decades. His edition is therefore, as the document states, “not a politically innocent replacement of a ‘flawed’ Victorian text with a ‘scientific’ modern one. It is an intervention in a long-running class struggle within historiography.”⁷
What Revisionism Seeks to Erase
The revisionist school does not correct Carlyle’s limitations from a more advanced standpoint. It retreats from them. It denies that the English Revolution was a revolution at all.
Against this retreat, Christopher Hill’s Marxist historiography stands as a towering achievement. Hill demonstrated in God’s Englishman that Cromwell was a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie: a man who purged Parliament until it reflected the needs of his class, built the New Model Army as an instrument of revolutionary power, and suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits of capitalist development. Hill’s position was that Cromwell “must be understood as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie… who suppressed the Levellers when the plebeian elements threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits required for capitalist society.”⁸
Hill’s work followed Trotsky’s analysis in Where Is Britain Going?, which identified two revolutionary traditions in British history—Cromwell and Chartism—both of which were systematically denied by the Whig myth of gradualism. Revisionism, for all its claims to sophistication, represents a return to this Whig outlook: the comforting fiction that Britain has been uniquely blessed with peaceful, incremental change. As the document notes, Simon Schama proudly declares himself “a born-again Whig.”⁹
The Political Meaning of Today’s Acclaim
The universal praise for Morrill’s edition is not a matter of scholarly merit alone. It reflects the political trajectory of the bourgeoisie itself. The class that once celebrated Cromwell as its revolutionary ancestor now finds that ancestry embarrassing. Having long since abandoned all progressive historical tasks, the bourgeoisie prefers to pretend that revolution never happened.
The bourgeoisie now insists that “the execution of Charles I was a regrettable incident, that the Levellers were irrelevant extremists, and that the whole unpleasant episode could have been avoided if only people had been more reasonable.”¹⁰This ideological sanitisation is not accidental. It serves contemporary political needs. A ruling class that fears revolution must deny that revolutions have ever been necessary, progressive, or successful.
Hence, the “unanimity of the acclaim” for Morrill’s edition. It “conforms to what the contemporary historical profession wants to believe about the seventeenth century and about revolution in general.”¹¹ A genuinely critical edition—one that illuminated rather than obscured the class forces at work—would not receive such praise.
The Working Class and the Revolutionary Heritage
The working class has every interest in understanding the English Revolution for what it was: the first in the series of bourgeois revolutions that created the conditions for modern capitalism and, in doing so, brought into being the proletariat itself.
The revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie—however historically limited—belong not to today’s anaemic liberalism but to the international working class. As the document concludes, these traditions “belong to the heritage of the international working class – not to the anaemic, phlegmatic liberalism that now disowns them.”¹²
To defend the revolutionary content of the English Civil War is therefore not an antiquarian exercise. It is part of the broader struggle to arm the working class with an understanding of the historical processes that shaped the modern world—and to expose the ideological falsifications through which the bourgeoisie seeks to obscure its own past and the revolutionary future that confronts it.
Notes
- “This is a significant publication… the universal acclaim from the historical profession should itself be interrogated.”
- Ibid.: Marx praised Carlyle for “having taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie… citing specifically ‘his apology for Cromwell’.”
- Ibid.: Carlyle recognised the Civil War as “a world-historical convulsion in which a class seized power through the execution of a king.”
- Ibid.: “His transcriptions were not always reliable… his commentary was infused with his own increasingly authoritarian worldview.”
- Ibid.: “There was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie…”
- Ibid.: “Even Cromwell… can better be understood as a representative of the declining gentry.”
- Ibid.: Morrill’s edition “is an intervention in a long-running class struggle within historiography.”
- Ibid.: Cromwell “must be understood as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie… who suppressed the Levellers…”
- Ibid.: “Simon Schama… happily declares himself ‘a born-again Whig.’”
- Ibid.: The bourgeoisie now claims “the execution of Charles I was a regrettable incident…”
- Ibid.: Morrill’s edition “conforms to what the contemporary historical profession wants to believe…”
- Ibid.: “The revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie… belong to the heritage of the international working class.”
A Trumpet of Sedition 